Tag Archives: cooking

We love holidays here at CMLE – and this week we are celebrating a fun one: National Peach Pie Day!

You can see Orville, the Official Office Bear for CMLE enjoying his own slice of peach pie! (Traditionally bears like honey, as we learned from Pooh; but you can definitely bake honey into your peach pie!)

Want to bake your own peach pie? There are lots of fun recipes to try! (And we encourage you to bring them to CMLE HQ to sample!)

Part of why I love peach pie in the summer time is that as a kid I attended the Cobden Peach Festival! If you have not heard of this festival, it’s not surprising. Cobden is a small town in Southern Illinois. They are famous for their apple and peach orchards, producing some great-tasting fruit! (They are also famous for their high school team, the Appleknockers, going all the way to the boy’s state basketball championships in 1964. Small towns always remember great stuff like this!!)

You can bring the fun of the Peach Festival to your end-of-summer celebrations, and let the spirit of the ’64 Appleknocker team inspire you to greatness, by making a peach pie yourself this week!We definitely encourage you to try something fun, and pie is always fun thing.

As library people, we are good at trying new things, and sharing information of all sorts – and food is one good way to share with others! Send us a photo of your pie!

CMLE members – this discussion was happening on a listserve, and had some great ideas you might want to try in your library! Don’t forget: if you do baking projects in your library, CMLE Headquarters is available for taste-testing!

“Like I’m guessing many of you, I was excited by the idea of a baking club posted over at SLJ here:

We are able to cook food and have it as part of our events, at least as of right now, so we’re not as restricted as many libraries are.

However, I am curious how, if you have a cooking or baking club, how do you handle:

Kitchen safety and knife skills?

Allergens and making sure the food is as safe as you can make it?

Permission slips — if so, examples?

Favorite recipes?

Different types of cuisine to try?

Thanks for any and all advice or tips! I know my teens will really love this, but I’d love to hear from any other librarians who do similar programs.”

These are suggestions for teen cooking programs from assorted libraries – but they could easily be done for all ages! The library people running these programs report they get a very good turnout; so might be a fun (potentially messy – never wrong) way to bring some new life into your programming.

Note: If your library does cooking programs, know that the CMLE HQ staff is ready and willing (even eager!) to come help with the taste testing! (And if you were not planning to include taste testers – we still volunteer!)

Teen Iron Chef

Cupcake Wars

Cake Boss

Fruit Bouquets

Stranger Things Cookie Bake-Off ( teens stop by the teen room to pick up a mystery ingredient that they have to incorporate into their cookies; since our theme is Stranger Things/80’s, we’ll be asking teens to use ingredients like Marshmallow Fluff, Teddy Grahams, and other snack foods that were released in the 80’s)

Make pasta from scratch – with rolling pins, the way my grandmother made it, not with a machine

A culinary school near by and the owner and an assistant (possibly student) came and did a pizza making program

Hunger Games Cornucopia themed food program where teens had to rush into the Cornucopia and grab an unmarked bag. They then had a certain amount of time to create a food creation using all of the ingredient.

Do you ever want to make a list of all of the ways that public libraries change lives? Have you ever considered putting “empowering people to eat healthier” on that list? After all, cooking a meal for yourself is beneficial on multiple levels: it brings emotional wellness, is gratifying, and gives you confidence!

This story caught my eye, and granted, it took place in a San Francisco library, but why not Minnesota?

It all started with the Edible Schoolyard, a 1-acre organic garden with an adjacent kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. There, students learned the basics of cooking, like peeling a carrot. Even college students often do not realize how food is grown, and even more people experience a disconnect between healthy food and how to cook it. And, the good news is, the public library has scads of books about cooking and gardening!

Is it possible that your public library has a staff member who was a past chef, or is pretty handy in the kitchen? Does your town or city have a Farmers Market, where the library could wheel in a sweet mobile kitchen called a Charlie Cart, built just for this purpose? Could the Charlie Cart be used in another area of the library…it has burners, an oven and utensils so you could show library patrons how to cook, offer them samples of what you prepared, and provide a list of cookbooks they could check out from the library too! I simply love this whole idea….